YOMAG - Advertising - Consumer Psychology

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Consumer Psychology

Campitello di Fassa 7. 06. 2008

How people relate to services and goods they purchase to use and how advertising can influence the choice of the consumer?

The term consumer psychology, also known as consumer behaviour, refers to how people relate to services and goods they purchase to use; for example how customers determine the value of a service, how advertising can influence the choice of the consumer.
The study of consumers is based on various issues such as: - The behaviour of people while shopping; - What determines the choice of the consumer; - What are the strategies that can better reach the consumer; - “Limitations in consumer knowledge or information processing abilities influence decisions and marketing outcome”. These issues help organizations to improve their advertising and adapt marketing strategies to the question of the consumer.
The most common strategies taken into consideration are to transmit advertisements during the afternoon or during the interruption of a film because there are more people watching television, or to organize the supermarkets by counting the actions of the consumers, for example by puttin the low cost products on the lowest shelves. It’s important also to determine and analyse the type of consumer to whom the products are addressed. For example if it is a cleaning product, it must have a strong impact on the consumers, who wishes to buy a useful and practical product to clean, and urge the customer to choose an item instead of another.
In fact, what gave birth of those studies is mainly the variety and choice of the productes, goods and services on the market. For example once “a Coke was a Coke”, but today there are so many types of Cola that the consumer is lost in the choice. The first psychologist who applied psychology to advertising was John B. Watson, who used the study of the human behaviour for practical issues, like advertising. The first industry he helped was “Johnson & Johnson’s”. He betted on mothers’ anxieties and feelings for their children and improved the advertising of the industry.
So we can deduct that our behaviour while shopping is not spontaneous, but it is influenced by the psychology applied to advertisement; so that when we think that a product can be better than another, maybe it’s not true, but only the consequence of a brilliant analysis of the consumer’s request and of his behaviour.

REFERENCES:

http://www.psichi.org/pubs/articles/article_52.asp http://www.consumerpsychologist.com/ http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-consumer-psychology.htm http://www.wcupa.edu/_academics/sch_cas.psy/career_paths/consumer/career05.htm